Mobile phones and cancer - the latest

If you ever needed more reassurance that endlessly chatting on your mobile won't damage your health, here it is. Two separate studies have found that mobile phones don't increase your risk of developing cancer.

The Tokyo Women’s Medical University recently studied 322 people with various forms of brain cancer and 683 people without such diseases. Each subject was rated according to how many years they have used a mobile phone for and how long each they spend chatting every day.

Claimed to be the first study to look at the effects of radiation from mobile phones on different parts of the brain, it failed to find any evidence that mobile phone use can lead to brain cancer.

Separately, Professor Bernard Stewart from the University of New South Wales created a banding system to categorise a person’s risk of developing various forms of cancer, according to their actions, including the use of a mobile phone.

The five bands, which range from proven to unlikely, place mobile phone use in the very lowest ‘carcinogenic risk’ category, along with drinking coffee and having breast implants. Unsurprisingly, smoking and drinking to excess will see you placed much further up the danger scale.

Prof Stewart’s banding system has already been applied to over 60 situations, including electromagnetic fields in the workplace.

So the general consensus seems to be that while long and frequent conversations on a mobile phone might not put you at risk of developing cancer, sucking on ciggies and knocking back gin while you're doing so, isn’t such a good idea.